Thinking of upgrading to Lacerte from Proseries

[amarefan1]

Hey everyone,

I've been using Proseries for about 5 years and have lately been thinking about switching to Lacerte. Although I'm very accustomed to Proseries and think it is a very solid product, I do not like how there is no option to enter a basis worksheet with Schedule K-1's to track basis limitation carryovers. I've also been using the Lacerte demo and the diagnostics seem to be way better. I also really love the classic and simple look of the forms view in Lacerte. 

As a way of background, I have about 400 clients - approximated 350 individual returns and 50 business. The business returns are mostly CA S-corps but I also have some LLC's. Most are pretty straight forward, but I've got a handful of mutlistate returns and part-year residence returns. I have heard Lacerte is also much better at handling multistate, and I hope to move my practice in the direction of doing more complex returns.

I'm not so much worried about getting used to the different style of input as I am the cost. It looks like Lacerte would cost me about double to what I'm paying for Proseries. I would have to raise prices by about $15 per return to make up for that which wouldn't be a huge deal but the price difference is still very significant.

My question is for Lacerte users who have also used Proseries, is there much value in switching over and delivering a superior product to clients and a more accurate tax return, or is it really just based on preference? I'm trying to decide if upgrading is worth it or will just turn into a huge waste of money over the years. Any insight is appreciated. Thank you!

[George4Tacks · Accepted solution]

They are quite different animals and there is definitely a learning curve. Lacerte does much more of the heavy lifting. See you you can get a free trial and give it a whirl. It does come with some demodata you can play with, but I would try to rebuild my most complex return and see how I like it.
I was originally an interview sheet driven software and some still use it that way. I have used it since day 1, so I have a bias. I like the very easy integration between federal and state.

[Dependable]

I used Lacerte for 25 years for about 1000 returns per.  Now that my returns are about 200 individual and 25 business returns I switched to Pro Series because of the cost.  I found that for basically simple returns it's fine but as a backup I also kept lacerte as a for complicated returns.  I did lacerte as REP so it wasn't that expensive and those returns I am able to pass through the additional cost.

[TaxGuyBill]

Although I've never used Lacerte (I use ProSeries), I would NEVER switch to another Intuit product.

The repeated actions of the company shows they don't care about the customer's satisfaction, and the problems seems to keep increasing every year.  If I wanted to go to another software and deal with the  "learning curve", I would try out ANY other company's tax software before using another Intuit software.